On Friday, August 15, 2008, at 09:49AM, "Charilaos Skiadas" cskiadas@gmail.com wrote:
On a related note, we've been having an off-list discussion as to whether we should have a preference setting to allow the user to say "I know synctex is cool and all that, but I just don't want it used". Would that be something people would want? Currently if your tex engine supports synctex, it will be used no matter what. With pdfsync this was less of an issue, since you have to specify the \include {pdfsync} statement, hence the user had a chance to turn it on and off, should they wish to. In the case of pdfsync it was also more critical, since there were slight layout changes when it was used. My understanding is that this is not the case for synctex, which makes it less clear whether it would still be useful for users to disable it. Hence the reason for this email, to get people's views on the matter.
You can explicitly enable synctex in a TeX source file with \synctex=1, so requiring that would be possible; I prefer enabling it via the command line, since that allows easy sharing of .tex files with collaborators using older TeX systems. Personally, I don't care to have it disabled, and the only reason I can see for disabling it is to avoid creating the synctex file (which isn't much of a reason, given all the other temporary files that LaTeX et al. create).